Page 2 of Nice Earls Do

Tabetha Holt Cantwell, Dowager Viscountess Manwaring, stared down at the gray pavement three stories below and sighed. London in November tried her patience. Her friends had long since decamped for the autumn entertainments of the countryside, and the promised amusements of the Christmas season were still weeks away. She was in danger of succumbing to ennui.

Truth be told, she was beginning to find it equally difficult to fend off boredom in the other eleven months of the year.

Early in her widowhood, London had held an allure nothing could match. Her late husband’s country estate, in which she’d been immured for the better part of twenty years, hadn’t even had much of a library. In London, she’d found plays and lectures and books and people. She’d devoured the town’s pleasures like a starving woman presented with a plate of cream puffs.

And now, she had a stomachache.

From the opposite end of the room, her stepson Oliver, Lord Manwaring, echoed her sigh. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call the noise he’d made a gasp. Oliver had a tendency toward the dramatic, to be sure, but when she’d gone to the window, he’d been lazily leafing through his correspondence, and he was not the sort of young man who generally exclaimed over the post.

In any case, the sound made her turn. His posture, usually teetering on the brink of indolence, was as rigid as she had ever seen it, though his head was bent over his letter. No, two letters, one in each hand. As she watched, he shoved the papers together in one fist and pushed the shaking fingers of the other hand through his dark brown curls.

She began to hurry toward him, then forced her steps to a more sedate pace. She’d been Oliver’s protector for so long, first from his father and later from the world, that the impulse to smooth his hair from his brow and solve his problems was second nature. Sometimes she forgot he was a grown man and might no longer appreciate the interference.

“What is it, dear?”

She had to repeat the question before he looked up from the papers, and when he did, his brown eyes verged on wild. “It seems I’ve landed in a spot of trouble, Mamabet,” he said, twisting his lips into a self-deprecating smile. He’d chosen the name for her on the second evening of their acquaintance, combining the address upon which his father had insisted with a lisped version of what she’d always been called by family and friends, which she’d told Oliver he might use in private.

She laid a hand along the curved back of a green-and-gold striped chair. “What sort of trouble?”

“The ‘detrimental to the name of Manwaring’ sort, I’m afraid.” He punctuated the sentence with a humorless laugh.

Detrimental to the name of Manwaring. His father’s phrase—they’d both heard it often enough. Applied variously to Oliver’s mannerisms, to his lack of athletic prowess and distaste for shooting a rifle, and most recently to his failure to choose a bride and “do his duty by the title,” Oliver’s own desires and future happiness be damned.

The late Lord Manwaring had not been an ideal husband, by any means, but he’d been a truly awful father to Oliver.

She’d entered the marriage in possession of all the desirable accomplishments a young lady might acquire—dancing, drawing, modern languages—and with a clear understanding of what was expected of her.

Or so she’d thought.

As it had turned out, she’d been better prepared by the books on philosophy she’d sneaked from her father’s library and by the childhood games of hide-and-seek she’d played with the boys next door. The old viscount had married her for one reason: to produce a second, more acceptable, son. Tabetha, who liked children very much and who had looked forward to motherhood, had not mourned her inability to give her husband what he most wanted. When he’d died, she had made the proper observances, but she had not mourned him in her heart.

Oliver sank back in his chair, the partner to the one against which Tabetha now leaned, and flung one leg over the rolled arm, in something approximating his usual relaxed pose. Only his death grip on the letters betrayed him.

“You’ve heard, I suppose, of Mrs. Goode’s Guide to Homekeeping?” he asked, not quite meeting her eye.

Tabetha was the sort of person who happily left decisions about the weekly menu to her housekeeper. She preferred the role of guest to that of hostess. And she had given carte blanche to Oliver when it came to redecorating the townhouse they shared.

But one would have to have taken up residence under a rock not to have heard of Mrs. Goode’s Guide, not only because of its ubiquity but because of the controversy it had engendered by making the secrets of elegant design and epicurean delights accessible to anyone who could afford the book: six shillings in paper, ten and sixpence bound.

Who would have suspected that homekeeping could inspire such passion?

She nodded, and though Oliver was not really looking at her, he seemed to have anticipated her answer.

“Well, this,” he said, shifting his thumb to push the uppermost letter forward slightly, “is from a devoted reader, the housekeeper of a bachelor gentleman who has recently been named guardian to the children of his dearly departed brother. He would benefit from Mrs. Goode’s assistance in the preparation of his nursery, she says.”

“And what, may I ask, has that to do with you?” As she spoke, Tabetha stepped around to the front of the chair and sat down, fearing Oliver’s answer might require it.

He favored her with a lopsided smile and lifted one shoulder. “I’m Mrs. Goode.”

Her mouth popped open, as if the hinge of her jaw were powered by a spring beyond her control. But no words came. Only a strangled noise of astonishment in her throat.

“That is to say,” he went on smoothly, ignoring the fact that she was gaping at him like a fish floundering on dry land, “I wrote the Guide to Homekeeping.”

Still wide-eyed, Tabetha glanced around the room. Four years ago, following her husband’s death, both she and her stepson had been eager for a change. Oliver had suggested the rarely used family townhouse in Berkeley Square and promised to make it ready for them to inhabit by the time her mourning ended. He’d always had a flair for colors and textiles, for arranging things just so—much to his father’s chagrin. Tabetha had agreed to remain in the country while Oliver chose every finish, every fabric. He’d overseen the workmen. And he’d recorded the adventure in a series of amusing letters to her that had made a long, dreary winter bearable.

Perhaps his revelation about the book should not have surprised her as much as it did.

“Does anyone else know?” she asked, dragging her gaze back to her stepson.